EPISODICAL 237 



though I once had three two-pounders in one day, and 

 not another fin, and once four two-pounders in one 

 evening. 



NINE TO ONE. 



The mill was a powerful one, or it would not have needed 

 a quarter of a mile of head, generally deep, and nowhere 

 less than five-and-twenty yards across, to do its day's 

 work. That there were big trout in the head I knew. 

 I saw one a few days ago which was not an ounce under 

 five pounds, and for some hours on each succeeding day 

 I haunted the head in the hope of finding him again, 

 not only in position, but in a taking mood. Once I 

 saw a fish rise twice in a little bay above a big tussock, 

 which, when one got near enough to cast to him, hid 

 the rise entirely. Nevertheless, with a good heart I 

 delivered a small floating March Brown to the spot 

 where I imagined the trout to be, struck at the sound 

 of the immediately succeeding rise, felt a horrid jar as 

 if I had hit a snag, and then the still horrider sense of 

 slackness that tells one that one has failed to fasten. The 

 trout departed with a great wave, but he was not my five- 

 pounder. That, however, was the only fish I saw move 

 during the five days which followed my glimpse of Leviathan. 

 There were other fish there I know, because on occasion 

 I saw the wave which a trout departing leaves behind him 

 (as the trouty equivalent for " footsteps on the sands of 

 time"), though a most careful inspection both of surface 

 and bottom had failed to reveal his presence alongside the 

 sludgy, tussock-ridden bank. The opposite bank, besides 

 being fringed with trees, often close together, and being 

 elsewhere clad with brambles and exaggerated specimens 

 of nettle, dock, willow-herb, and what had once been 

 meadowsweet, was anything from five feet to eight feet 

 above the water. It did not therefore offer an ideal vantage 



